LOS ANGELES — The Hollywood diversity discussion has reached the point of supersaturation online: Not a scrap of movie or TV news escapes the boiling rage of fans, bloggers — even filmmakers — who are fed up with the indisputable fact that women and minorities are heinously underrepresented here.

These voices are passionate, they are persistent and they are armed with depressing statistics, like the fact that less than one-third of speaking characters in today's top movies are played by women, or that women directed 1.9% of those films. And it's not getting better.

Plenty of fuel for the firestorm has surfaced over the past few weeks, most recently on Monday, when someone high up at Sony Pictures Entertainment whispered to Deadline.com that the studio is developing a “female-led” superhero film from its Spider-Man universe. It was a calculated leak, meant to steal a bit of Marvel’s thunder as its parent company Disney was celebrating a record $94 million for Guardians of the Galaxy.

A scene from Marvel/Disney's "Guardians of the Galaxy."

Image: Marvel/Disney

It was also frustratingly half-assed — an appeal to the outraged without an actual commitment.

The studio, according to the report, is "eyeing" a 2017 release date, but hadn't sorted out which female character it would develop, and that’s largely because Sony doesn't have a bankable one in its stable. While DC has Wonder Woman and Marvel has dozens of marginally recognizable female characters, the Spider-Man “universe” is hardscrabble, particularly with regard to females. Black Cat? Spider-Woman?

Sony was already caught crossing the gender streams when it was reported over the weekend that the studio was kicking around a Ghostbusters reboot with an all-female ensemble and Bridesmaids writer/director Paul Feig on its wish-list. He may do it — he more likely may not — but the whole thing stirred up a huge flame war between Deadline writer Mike Fleming and his own colleague, Anita Busch, a debate that played out on their own site.

But the truth is, Sony's overtures were just the cherry on top of a huge gender-role sundae that the Hollywood press has been scooping out for weeks. So many other stories have inflamed this already sore subject, including, but not limited to:

Marvel comics’ announcement that Thor will be a woman. Yes, many actually cried foul on this one, the argument being that it's a temporary and thereby patronizing move, just a woman inhabiting a man’s role instead of the meaningful development of a female character.

Marvel comics’ announcement that Samuel “The Falcon” Wilson, who is black, would take on the Captain America role (apply above logic).

Lucy easily beating Hercules in a head-to-head box office brawl had many wagging their fingers that Hollywood is out of touch with what audiences really want.

The apparent obliteration of founding Avenger Janet “The Wasp” van Dyne from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, by way of Ant-Man.

The True Detective Season 2 cast mystery: After a season of white-male psyche, which was great, we've been promised a stronger female presence, including a three-lead ensemble that may include, you know, a woman.

And the ongoing controversy about the cast of the Star Wars: Episode VII, which garnered howls when it started out being heavily male-dominated. The project has since added enough women — six females among the 20 characters announced so far — to bring it almost exactly in line with the less-than-30% figure we see across the industry.

Daisy Ridley is the only "unknown" in the new "Star Wars" cast.

Image: IMDB

The 30% figure (also referenced in the beginning of this story) comes from a study by the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California, which every year surveys film and TV to divine the gender curve. The study is funded by the school and supporters of its Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative, and the results are not promising — in particular because the discrepancies are deep, abiding and showing no signs of improvement.

In some cases, they are getting worse.

The biggest disconnect actually lies not with women, but with Hispanics, who make up nearly 17% of the U.S. population and buy roughly 25% of all movie tickets sold annually in the U.S. Yet only 4.9% of speaking characters in the top 100 films are Latino.

“Hispanics clearly are the most underserved racial/ethnic group by the film industry,” is the conclusion of a separate study by Annenberg, also published recently.

Hollywood may have a built-in excuse here, that the Hispanic population has been exploding in recent years — maybe they’re just catching up.

But as for women? Well, they’ve been around awhile now.

Annenberg reviewed a total of 4,506 speaking parts from the top 100 grossing films of 2013 to determine what this story has already referenced — that a mere 29.2% of those characters were played by women. That was lower than previous results from 2007 (29.9%), 2008 (32.8%), 2009 (32.8%) and 2010 (30.3%).

There are other slices of 2013 data that should make your blood boil, no matter what combination of chromosomes it carries: Of the top 100 films, 28% had a female lead or co-lead. Only 2% percent featured more female characters than males. Two percent.

It’s certainly no better behind the camera: “Out of 1,374 directors, writers, and producers credited across the sample, less than a fifth (15.9%) of these content creators were women. This calculates into a gender ratio of 5.3 male filmmakers to every 1 female,” the study found.

The most frustrating and confounding aspect of all of this is: What’s to be done? Because waiting around for things to get better does not seem to be an option.

“The prevalence of female speaking characters in film has … remained stable for decades,” reads the study’s conclusion. “Given the wealth of research on the topic, the lack of female characters does not appear to be a problem that will self‐correct over time.”

However, the study puts the impetus on “decision-makers and filmmakers” to “match the demography of their creative constructions to that of the individuals filling the seats at movie theaters.” Which, if you know anything about how people break into and then rise in Hollywood … sounds an awful lot like “Waiting around for things to get better.”

There are some out-in-the-open efforts here, in particular at its trade publications, to draw attention to the efforts of women in prominent roles. The Hollywood Reporter publishes an annual “women’s issue.” Variety and TheWrap host annual “power women” events that draw big names to their luncheons and red carpets. But at their core, these events are sponsorship opportunities, part of an events cottage industry that adds to the publications’ bottom lines.

Comic-Con has hosted a “Women Who Kick Ass” panel two years running, an event that goes on immediately before Marvel’s big-top presentation in Hall H. Some remarked at the irony of making fanboys sit through the panel to get to their beloved superhero hype-fest, but that's not really a fair place to point a finger — about 40% of Comic-Con badges are sold to women, and some 44% of the Guardians of the Galaxy audience was female (the largest yet for any Marvel movie). Plenty of men in attendance would love to see one of the studios take a crack at a Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman — or even Spider-Woman — movie.

And it’s not as though the outrage online could get much louder or more persistent, as these past couple of weeks have proven.

So if neither the march of time and external progress, nor industry hyper-awareness, nor persistent public outrage can change the egregiously male-dominated culture of Hollywood, what can?

A single superhero?

By the looks of it, we’re about to find out. But it certainly can't make things any worse.

Do you have an idea about how to meaningfully change the culture in Hollywood? We'd love to hear about it in the comments.

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